A Conversation with Chelsea Manning

About the Guests

Chelsea Manning
Chelsea E. Manning is a Washington D.C based technologist and network security expert whose actions have shown the power of individuals to change the world through bravery, conscience, and determination. She speaks on the social, technological and economic ramifications of Artificial Intelligence, and on the practical applications of machine learning. She is a vocal advocate for government transparency and queer and transgender rights as @xychelsea on Twitter and through her op-ed columns for The Guardian and The New York Times.

Chelsea E. Manning worked as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense, where she publicly disclosed classified documents that revealed human rights abuses and corruption connected to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Upon being sentenced to 35 years for leaking government documents, an unprecedented amount of time for whistleblowers, she publicly identified as a trans woman and asserted her legal rights to medical therapy. After serving 7 years in military prison, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence to time served. She was released in 2017. In January 2018, Manning announced her intention to run for a United States Senate seat in Maryland. 

Kevin Duong 
Kevin Duong has been at Bard since 2016. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and his M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on democracy and political violence, with an area focus on modern French political thought and European intellectual history. He is currently working on a book manuscript that traces how revolutionary violence by “the people” offered a vocabulary of social regeneration during and after the French Revolution. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Gustave Gimon Collection at Stanford, among others. At Bard, he teaches classes on the history of political thought, gender and sexuality, and on various topics in modern intellectual history and European political development.

Dean Rebecca Thomas
Rebecca Thomas assumed her role as Dean in 2015. She received her SB degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her PhD in computer science from Stanford University.  Her technical research has been in the subfield of artificial intelligence, focusing on problems such as coalition formation in multi-agent systems and natural language processing, specifically text simplification. She has published in conferences and journals including KONVENS Conference on Natural Language Processing, the Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, the SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, the International Journal of Intelligent Systems, the Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, and a chapter in the volume Foundations of Rational Agency. In addition, she is a co-author of “Becoming a Computer Scientist: A Report by the ACM Subcommittee on the Status of Women in Computing Science,” in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machines (1990) which has since been reprinted several times in books and other venues. She has received grants, fellowships, and awards from IBM, the National Science Foundation, AT&T Bell Laboratories, the University of Northern Iowa, and the Bard College Summer Research Institute. She has taught at Stanford University, Middlebury College, the University of Northern Iowa, Marist College, and Bard College. In her time on the Bard College faculty she taught eighteen different courses including First Year Seminar and Citizen Science, plus thirteen tutorials. She is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and has been a member of the Bard College faculty since 2000.